The billionaire oligarch effectively controls the federal government right now.

It makes sense that most of us focus on money when it comes to our happiness. Not being able to afford stuff like rent is stressful, and going into debt to feed yourself just exacerbates that sense of powerlessness. Whatever your financial situation, unless you’re oligarch-levels of wealthy you probably focus everything on making, saving, and stretching a much money as possible.

But if you’re not happy even if your bills are paid and your debt is manageable, it’s probably because you’re thinking about money the wrong way. Instead of thinking about being affluent in terms of money, you should be thinking in terms of being affluent in time.

What is time affluence?

Time affluence—the feeling that you have enough time to accomplish everything you want to get done—is a crucial aspect of our happiness and sense of personal satisfaction. Time poverty is the opposite—that stressful feeling you get when there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Between commuting to and from our jobs, the time spent working, then the chores at home, many of us barely have time to eat some dinner and maybe stream a show before collapsing into bed—and starting the process over again the next day.

Then, our weekends are filled with household projects and maintenance and other responsibilities (or second jobs or overtime). We keep telling ourselves that we’ll get back to a hobby, or make time to see friends, or get some extra sleep next week, or next month, or at some unknowable time in the future.

Time poverty has been shown to have an adverse effect on both mental and physical health. The mistake many of us make is thinking that the answer to time poverty is simply having more money—but the key is using money to gain more time. If all you’re doing is selling more of your time (to a second job, or a more demanding position) then you’re actually increasing your time poverty even if your bank account is growing. On the other hand, having more money means you can potentially buy more time for yourself. The trick is to stop thinking solely in terms of how you’re spending your money and more in terms of how you’re spending your time.

How to become time affluent

Time is one of the few resources in our lives we can’t create more of no matter how creative, ambitious, or hard-working we are. You get 24 hours in a day and that’s it—and once those hours are gone you can’t get them back. But what you can do to become more time affluent is manage your time more effectively, treating it like the limited resource it is. You can achieve more time affluence by doing four fundamental things:

• Organize and prioritize. Since your time is limited, stop treating it like an amorphous, infinite resource you always have more of. Make lists of things you need or want to do and prioritize them. Then use time blocking to break each of those priorities into a fixed amount of time needed to accomplish them or at least move them toward completion. This avoids letting tasks pile up, which increases stress and that sense of not being in control of your time, and provides a visual guide to how your day will play out. And having clear times for specific activities to end will increase your efficiency.

• Delegate. Always think about what you can delegate to someone else. For example, if you can afford to hire cleaners for your home you can reclaim the time you would otherwise spend cleaning the house. You’re essentially buying time from someone else.

  But reclaiming that time doesn’t have to mean paying someone. If there are tasks that someone else in your life could be taking on (chores at home or work tasks not officially in your job description, for example) that will also claw back some time for you.

• Automate. Are there aspects of your life you can automate? Bill paying is an easy example of this: Instead of spending an hour every week paying bills individually, setting up automatic payments gets you that hour back. Think about any opportunities you have to automate stuff—prescription refills, meal plans (if it’s in your budget), even grocery shopping can be automated these days through weekly subscription platforms.

• Monotask. Finally, be aware of what’s known as “time confetti”—the way we spend little bits of time on a seemingly infinite scroll of activities, most of them online. Jumping from thing to thing can feel like multitasking, but it isn’t an efficient way to get stuff done.

  Instead, monotask, which means focusing on a single task until it’s done. It’s an extremely simple concept, but it requires discipline, like sticking to the time-blocking schedule you created, eliminating distractions, and forcing yourself to focus.

Having more money can make some of these steps easier or even possible, surely—but you can apply these four principles to your time management no matter what your financial circumstances are, and improve your time affluence to poverty ratio at least a little bit.

The Federal Trade Commission asked a judge in Seattle to delay the start of its trial accusing Amazon of duping consumers into signing up for its Prime program, citing resource constraints. CNBC: Attorneys for the FTC made the request during a status hearing on Wednesday before Judge John Chun in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. Chun had set a Sept. 22 start date for the trial. Jonathan Cohen, an attorney for the FTC, asked Chun for a two-month continuance on the case due to staffing and budgetary shortfalls.

The FTC’s request to delay due to staffing constraints comes amid a push by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to reduce spending. DOGE, which is led by tech baron Elon Musk, has slashed the federal government’s workforce by more than 62,000 workers in February alone. “We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on our case team,” Cohen said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many people using older Chromecast devices experienced a shock in recent days when their units lost the ability to cast content. The company ended the brand last year, which led folks to think that this was a planned obsolescence of some kind. Here’s some good news. It’s just a software issue and Google is working on it.

The company sent an email to users to say that its engineers are “working to resolve this as soon as possible, and will keep you updated when there is more to share.” Google was fairly vague in its wording here, but at least we know a fix is coming.

The issue primarily impacts older Chromecasts and the Chromecast Audio device and prevents them from casting. Google says the cause of the problem has been identified but didn’t reveal any specifics.

However, it has cautioned users to not factory reset impacted Chromecast devices. This will lock users out of the gadget entirely. Google has suggested it would help these people, because performing a factory reset would likely be one of the first troubleshooting steps, but hasn’t provided a time frame.

One Reddit user claims to have found the problem that caused the devices to lose functionality, noting that it was “most definitely due to the certificate baked into the Chromecast having expired.” This person said that the certificate specified it would no longer be active after March 9 and, well, that’s the day before many models started failing.

For the uninitiated, the issue causes an “untrusted device error” whenever someone tries to cast on certain models. The only option is to dismiss the error, which disables casting. Impacted units include the 2nd-gen Chromecast from 2015 and the Chromecast Audio.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/google-apologizes-for-chromecast-outage-and-promises-a-fix-172103579.html?src=rss

Most new AI models go big—more parameters, more tokens, more everything. Google’s newest AI model has some big numbers, but it’s also tuned for efficiency. Google says the Gemma 3 open source model is the best in the world for running on a single GPU or AI accelerator. The latest Gemma model is aimed primarily at developers who need to create AI to run in various environments, be it a data center or a smartphone. And you can tinker with Gemma 3 right now.

Google claims Gemma 3 will be able to tackle more challenging tasks compared to the older open source Google models. The context window, a measure of how much data you can input, has been expanded to 128,000 from 8,192 tokens in previous Gemma models. Gemma 3, which is based on the proprietary Gemini 2.0 foundation, is also a multimodal model capable of processing text, high-resolution images, and even video. Google also has a new solution for image safety called ShieldGemma 2, which can be integrated with Gemma to help block unwanted images in three content categories: dangerous, sexual, or violent.

Most of the popular AI models you’ve heard of run on collections of servers in a data center, filled to the brim with AI computing power. Many of them are far too large to run on the kind of hardware you have at home or in the office. The release of the first Gemma models last year gave developers and enthusiasts another low-hardware option to compete with the likes of Meta Llama3. There has been a drive for efficiency in AI lately, with models like DeepSeek R1 gaining traction on the basis of lower computing costs.

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Rian Johnson’s mystery show starring Natasha Lyonne returns for season two on May 8.

These are a couple video of San Francisco lawyer Trevor Mead’s Doleresaurus costume, a blue-LED illuminated t-rex exoskeleton he likes to wear around Haight Street and Dolores Park at sunset. Hey — we all spend our evenings differently. Unless you spend yours eating multiple TV dinners back-to-back and yelling at video games, in which case we spend them the exact same.

Authors think that Meta’s admitted torrenting of a pirated books data set used to train its AI models is evidence enough to win their copyright fight—which previously hinged on a court ruling that AI training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use.

Moving for summary judgment on a direct copyright infringement claim on Monday in a US district court in California, the authors alleged that “whatever the merits of generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, stealing copyrighted works off the Internet for one’s own benefit has always been unlawful.”

In their filing, the authors accused Meta of brazenly deciding to torrent terabytes of pirated book data after attempts to download pirated books one by one “posed an immense strain on Meta’s networks and proceeded very slowly.”

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Priority Notifications is a new Apple Intelligence feature that’s rolling out with the iOS 18.4 update, which is currently in beta. It’s one of the last AI features that we will see with the iOS 18 update cycle, and it goes hand-in-hand with Apple’s Notifications Summary feature, though they are distinct. Perhaps because of the backlash Apple got to Notification Summaries, this feature isn’t even enabled by default. You have to enable it instead.

How Priority Notifications Work

Like many new Apple Intelligence features, Priority Notifications uses on-device AI processing to figure out what your most important notification is at any given point. Then, it surfaces those notifications (sometimes bundling up two or three and providing a summary) right to the top.

When the feature is enabled and an important notification comes in, you’ll see it a new Priority Notifications box above the rest of your pings. Like with many Apple Intelligence features, this box has that same multicolor glow all around it, so you can know it was made by AI.

What exactly is important and not, is deemed by Apple’s processing algorithms. In my testing, I found that things like missed calls, one-time codes for deliveries or logins, messages from my bank about transactions and emails from my work account always came up top. These will depend on the person and the use case, but overall, this feature is designed to help people who don’t manually manage their notifications well. So, if you’re always swimming in dozens of notifications from food delivery apps, shopping apps, or news apps, having a dedicated section up top to tell you when you’ve missed an important message or a call might be genuinely useful.

How to enable and customize Priority Notifications

Apple isn’t enabling this feature by default, even if you’ve already enabled Apple Intelligence. To find it, go to Settings > Notifications > Prioritize Notifications and toggle it on.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Now, you can let Apple do its thing, and it’ll try to figure out which of your notifications are truly important.

But to improve things, you can go one step further. If you scroll down, you will see a list of all the apps that can feed into the Priority Notifications system. If you don’t want to see any false positives, you can apps you don’t want to see in the Priority Notifications box, like food delivery apps, news apps, and so on.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

If you find that Priority Notifications isn’t for you, you can come back to Settings > Notifications > Prioritize Notifications to disable it altogether. If you’re feeling the notifications overload, you can also take some time to customize the rest of the iPhone notifications system so that it works for you, instead of against you.

Schools across the United States are increasingly using artificial intelligence to monitor students’ online activities, raising significant privacy concerns after Vancouver Public Schools inadvertently released nearly 3,500 unredacted, sensitive student documents to reporters.

The surveillance software, developed by companies like Gaggle Safety Management, scans school-issued devices 24/7 for signs of bullying, self-harm, or violence, alerting staff when potential issues are detected. Approximately 1,500 school districts nationwide use Gaggle’s technology to track six million students, with Vancouver schools paying $328,036 for three years of service.

While school officials maintain the technology has helped counselors intervene with at-risk students, documents revealed LGBTQ+ students were potentially outed to administrators through the monitoring.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lately, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has taken an aggressive posture toward Europe. He has called for the United States to exit NATO, a strategic alliance that has been the bedrock of trans-Atlantic cooperation since the end of World War II. Musk has also championed right-wing populism that seeks to topple existing governments on the continent.

And then there’s Musk’s increasingly antagonistic attitude toward Ukraine, a country viewed by many Europeans as a bulwark against further Russian aggression. This threatens the availability of a vital link in Ukraine’s military, Starlink.

Musk’s world-class satellite technology has provided life-saving connectivity to citizens and soldiers in Ukraine. It has increased that country’s offensive capabilities. And yet Musk could shut off his Starlink service anywhere in the world with an email.

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Disney’s live-action adaptation of its hit animated film opens in theaters May 23.

With the April 15 deadline right around the corner, you want to ensure you’re taking advantage of all the deductions you can. Andy Phillips, Vice President of H&R Block’s Tax Institute, says his tax experts are getting plenty of questions from filers looking to maximize every deduction available to them. I wrote about some wacky and unexpected tax deductions last week, but what about the most common ones that filers just don’t fully understand? From gig worker perks to retirement contributions, here are the tax deductions every filer needs to know.

Retirement contributions and traditional IRA deductions 

Phillips says that if you contribute to a tax-advantaged traditional retirement account (IRA, 401(k), etc.), you may owe less tax than if you didn’t contribute. With a 401(k), you might not even realize you’re receiving an exclusion if you have your contribution automatically made in conjunction with your paycheck. The money comes out before the taxes do, resulting in a reduction of your taxable income. 

With a traditional IRA, you can still get a tax deduction without requiring access to an employer plan. However, your tax break may be limited if you also participate in an employer plan. For self-employed taxpayers, SEP IRA and SIMPLE (Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees) IRA contributions are “above the line” tax deductions. See the other self-employed deductions below.  

Self-employment expenses 

As side hustles become ever more popular, it’s no surprise that self-employment expenses are more common. For example, if you pay for your own qualified health insurance, that may count as an “above the line” deduction. Also, you can deduct half of your self-employment tax above-the-line. 

On top of that, Phillips reminds filers you can deduct business expenses like internet costs, office supplies, advertising, and business travel from your business income. And, for qualifying individuals, you can take the home office deduction.

Student loan interest

Phillips reminds filers with student loan debt that you can deduct some or all of the interest you paid that year for a qualified student loan. In fact, federal student loan borrowers could qualify to deduct up to $2,500 of student loan interest per tax return per tax year. You can claim the student loan interest tax deduction as an adjustment to income—you don’t need to itemize deductions to claim it. 

Charitable contributions

You will need to itemize your deductions if you want to deduct your charitable donations. “Many people find it worth itemizing these deductions,” says Phillips, “particularly if you give regularly to a church or other charity.”

It’s also possible to deduct the current fair market value of goods you donate to charity. Make sure you get a receipt for your donations, whether they are cash or goods. And don’t forget to keep track of your mileage if you drive on behalf of a charity; that’s tax-deductible, too. 

Your kids—even newborns?

You can claim all qualifying children that were born or adopted within the tax year you are filing. Even if your child was born on Dec. 31, your child may be able to be claimed as a dependent on your taxes. However, Phillips clarifies that if your child is born after Dec. 31, even though your pregnancy lasted most of the tax year, you’ll have to wait until you file the next year’s return to claim them.

To be your qualifying child, the child must:

• Be related to you as your child, foster child, sibling, half-sibling, step-sibling, or descendant of any of them;

• Be under age 19, a full-time student under age 24, or permanently and totally disabled;

• Not provide more than half of the child’s own total support; and

• Live with you for more than half of the year they were alive.

• Not be filing a joint return with a spouse unless it’s to claim a refund of income tax withheld or estimated payments

If you are a dependent who’s earning income, good news—your parents can still claim you as a dependent so long as other dependent rules still apply. Your earned income doesn’t go on their return. Filing tax returns for children is easy in that respect. However, you may need to report it on your own tax return. 

What can’t you deduct from your taxes?

While you’re searching for all the possible deductions out there, you’re going to hit a few roadblocks.

Commuting costs

Unfortunately, commuting costs are not tax deductible. Commuting expenses incurred between your home and your main place of work, no matter how far, are not an allowable deduction. Costs of driving a car from home to work and back, again, are personal commuting expenses. This is also true for fares you pay to ride any sort of public transportation to and from work.                           

Phillips points out, though, that if you are a member of a reserve component of the Armed Forces and travel more than 100 miles away from home in connection with the performance of services as a member of the reserves, you can deduct your qualified travel expenses. 

Your cat’s vet bills

Unfortunately, deducting medical expenses for pets is not allowed as a medical expense on your tax return. Phillips says the only exception would be when an animal is a certified service animal, like a guide dog, to assist you. Service animals generally aren’t considered pets, though. If you have a physical disability or are hearing or visually impaired, you can deduct medical expenses for your pets if they are certified service animals. Expenses that may be covered include purchasing, training, and maintenance of the animal which includes food, grooming, and medical care. 

Remember to keep accurate records and consult with a tax professional if you have any questions or concerns. By taking advantage of these deductions, you can potentially lower your tax liability and keep more of your hard-earned money.

Apple and Metallica have teamed up to bring a free, immersive experience from one of the band’s concerts to Apple Vision Pro. Starting on March 14, owners of the headset will be able to watch live performances of “Whiplash,” “One” and, of course, “Enter Sandman” filmed at a stop on Metallica’s M72 World Tour last year. An EP recorded at the show, titled M72 World Tour: Mexico City, will hit Apple Music this Friday and be available with spatial audio.

To capture the set in 180-degree video and spatial audio, Apple constructed a custom stage setup with 14 Apple Immersive Video cameras. Some cameras were suspended on cables and on remote-controlled dolly systems.

The immersive set will likely be a fun experience for those in the Venn diagram overlap of Metallica enjoyers and those who have splashed out $3,500 on an Apple Vision Pro (you’ll be able to check it out by booking a free demo at an Apple Store too). But will it be as cool as the time lightning struck the skies while Metallica played “Master of Puppets” at an outdoor show last year? Probably not.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/apple-vision-pro-users-can-check-out-a-short-immersive-metallica-concert-film-this-week-162611039.html?src=rss

The fragmentary bones belong to Homo affinis erectus, an esoteric offshoot of our family tree that inhabited Spain more than one million years ago.

More than 6,000 people watched as a man stabbed Airi Sato in the head.